Filmmaker’s documentary reveals strength that can arise from devastation

"Beyond Belief" is Beth Murphy's film about American and Afghani women who have lost their husbands to violence and hate.

By CONSTANCE GORFINKLE

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

By CONSTANCE GORFINKLE

Posted Oct. 21, 2008 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 21, 2008 at 9:09 PM

By CONSTANCE GORFINKLE

Posted Oct. 21, 2008 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 21, 2008 at 9:09 PM

» Social News

A group of women sit on the floor in a circle. All wear the same expressions of sadness, but two seem different from the others. Those two are Americans; the others are Afghanis.

These are women from different cultures who speak different languages and can communicate only through translators. But all have tears in their eyes because they’ve all suffered the same loss: their husbands died from violence and hate.

The two Americans are Susan Retik of Needham and Patti Quigley of Wellesley. They have traveled to Afghanistan because it harbored the men who boarded two planes on Sept. 11, 2001, at Logan Airport in Boston, overpowered the pilots, and crashed the planes into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, taking with them Retik’s and Quigley’s husbands.

The American women’s mission was to meet their counterparts in this war-torn land, fellow victims of the same kind of zealotry and cruelty that brought down those planes.

Accompanying them on this journey was Beth Murphy, whose 10-year career as a documentary filmmaker has taken her to many other desperate places to chronicle the personal stories of people caught up in some of the world’s worst crises, from slavery in Sudan to the plight of Iraqis desperate to come to the United States.

``Beyond Belief'' is the documentary that came out of the encounter in Afghanistan and was considered so affecting it was invited to have its debut at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. An exploration of what drove Retik and Quigley to turn tragedy into a voyage of discovery and connection, the film reveals the kind of strength that can arise from devastation when people claim their own destiny and work to create promise where once there was no hope.

Such is the story of two suburbanites turned activists who have dedicated themselves to raising money for destitute Afghan widows.

No less dedicated is Murphy, who just six days after the birth of her daughter, Isabelle, was ``on a plane to do an interview that couldn’t be postponed.''

``My folks called my husband and asked how he could let me go. And he had to explain to them that this is our life.''

That’s how it has been since Murphy left a career in radio and TV news to explore people’s experiences through war, disease and oppression. The impetus to go out on her own came from, she says, ``my need to tell real-life stories in a much longer format'' than news reporting would have allowed, an urge that has resulted in an impressive body of work.

Murphy received two Emmy nominations and a couple of awards from American Women in Radio and Television.

Her films don’t get a lot of hype; they just show up quietly in places like PBS, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and Lifetime Television, as well as many foreign outlets. But so comprehensive and probing is her work that she has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and invited to appear on ``Oprah.''

Page 2 of 3 -
Occasionally, however, her films make it to the big screen. That will be the case on Thursday and Nov. 2, when ``Beyond Belief'' is shown at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Sitting in a booth at Whole Foods in Hingham on a recent sunny day, it was hard to reconcile the cheerful, attractive blonde, who looked like any other busy shopper, with someone whose steely determination to film an important story has carried her to the world’s hottest – and coldest – spots.

That’s how she wound up in Siberia a few years ago. She was with a Russian bioscientist who was trying to find out what strain of virus had caused the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed millions of people all over the world. To do that, he had gotten permission to exhume some victims of the pandemic whose decomposition would have been limited by the extreme cold of that area.

He found what he had suspected, that the deadly virus suffered by those early victims was exactly the same as one currently infecting people in various parts of the globe, a virus known as the avian flu because of its transference by birds. Murphy’s film, ``Flu Time Bomb,'' chronicled for the first time this discovery and the research it has furthered in finding a cure.

Looking considerably younger than her 39 years, Murphy works with only two other people in her small Plymouth office and in the field: longtime associates Sean Flynn, producer and cinematographer, and Kevin Belli, editor and director of photography.

A native of Connecticut, Murphy lives in Plymouth with her husband, Dennis, owner of a real estate agency, and Isabelle, now 1. Her interest in international affairs blossomed at BU and led to her becoming a board member of the International Institute of Boston, an organization, she explains, ``that helps immigrants and refugees.'' Fed by her connections there and other sources, Murphy has no lack of ideas for her documentaries.

When one especially strikes her, ``I then try to sell the idea to someone who can put it on.'' When she gets the go-ahead to move forward with a film, a process begins that can take years, thousands of miles of travel, and many side jobs to raise the financing needed to do the work she loves.

Right now, Murphy is involved in two new projects, one having to do with the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the other a study of Iraqis who have been working with American military forces during the current war and are trying to get sanctuary here for themselves and their families because their work has marked them for death in their native land.